In the piece on John Harris I mentioned that the implications of his terrible truth hadn’t sunk in yet. Indeed, it is a slow and ongoing jigsaw puzzle-like experience full of small pieces that fit the larger picture. The Modern Slave Guide series tries to reflect this process with the odd guffaw along the way to counter the dry heaves.

Now, I wouldn’t want to begin by implying that the folks behind the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights speak mass backwards or perform pentagram daisy chains. But once the fundamental issue exposed by Harris becomes clear –namely, the legal distinction between human beings and persons– a clear intent becomes apparent in the Articles and the order in which they appear. Of course, the United Nations is widely known to be driven by a secret cabal of suckers of the scaly dick with the stated goal of promoting evil and enslaving humanity, so finding manipulator legalese in the Declaration is kinda like finding maggots in a fly-infested carcass: sickening, but hardly surprising.

Before getting down & dirty, please take into account that I’m not a lawyer so this is just a layman’s interpretation. In fact, a real lawyer may well be able to disprove my entire thesis with a few succint sentences and a snide laugh. But since I’m not planning to pay one to do so, I’m not really expecting any to come around posting here, excepting those pushing blog spam to pay the rent. That said, the message option is freely and anonymously open below to all, as always.

So let’s take a look at the first six Articles of the Declaration. These are the top six rights that belong to you as a human according to the U.N., in order of importance:

Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 1 sets the “spirit” or theoretical basis the Declaration, which is also the directive under which all Articles are to be understood. No other Article may be interpreted in any way that is contravention to the first Article. Traditionally, this is the place to put all the nice stuff about freedom, equality, brotherhood, pursuit of hapiness and so on.

Note that here we find ourselves defined as human beings; indeed all the first Article rights belong to the realm of natural law, those which are not granted by law of man or tainted by the shenanigans of the manipulator legalese. So the Declaration begins by stating that we are, first and foremost, human beings.

The shenanigans begin in Article 2, the non-discrimination clause. This Article states that “no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.”

Okay, here we have a legal definition “hidden” in the text which creates a new and different legal entity called a “person” which is defined as “belonging to a country or territory”. From this point onwards, we are being considered EXCLUSIVELY AS PERSONS, NOT HUMAN BEINGS. The term “human being”, in fact, does not appear again one single time in any of the remaining 29 Articles. Instead, the terms “everyone” and “no one” are used, as defined here arguably to mean “all the persons” or “none of the persons”.

This is no cheap legalese parlour trick; this is the master sleight of hand that holds the entire illusion together. The Declaration graciously summarizes our natural rights as human beings in the first Article, and then proceeds to waive them by creating a legal entity called a person which is NOT mentioned in Article 1 but is accountable under the other 29 Articles.

To become a person all you have to do is to consent to it. Nothing more, nothing less. Harris goes over the numerous ways we consent to being persons every day. As persons we belong to a territory, which is a defined area (including land and waters), considered to be a possession of a person, organization, institution, animal, state or country subdivision. So persons belong to possessions of other persons… take out the middleman and add it up yourself.

Some may argue that the verb “to belong” is common use for defining nationalities, but legalese doesn’t do common use. In contracts words are not chosen because they sound nice, but because they MEAN something strict and clearly defined, not what YOU may think it means. When a contract says you “belong” to something, it is not waxing poetic, but stating a fact. If the legal concept did NOT mean to reflect private ownership of persons, then instead of saying “territory to which a person belongs” it could read “place to which a human being is born“, for example. But it doesn’t, because that’s not what it’s saying.

Article 4 defines a person’s right not to be enslaved. Obviously, this Article refers to old school slavery, not its modern counterpart, mostly because Rule Number One about Modern Slavery is there is no Modern Slavery. By creating a new definition (person) to describe the modern slave, it becomes possible to own another human being without it being considered slavery.

Article 6 ties it all up; all persons stand under the statutes or Rule of Law, being recognized by the corporate judicial entities as belongings of a territory. This supposedly is an improvement over NOT being considered a person, in which case you are just a plain human being with no intrinsic value to the system except for target practice.

So, the 1M$ question: why even bother with all this longwinded legal bullcrap instead of just saying it like it is: you’re a modern slave-person because you’ve consented to being one? Well, because if they said that upfront, 99 percent of humanity would simply ignore them until they starved to death. Under the smothering guise of “legality”, folks can still be convinced that being a person is a fact of life and not slavery under another name.

However, and this is a capital However, if and when the time comes for those accused of crimes against humanity to answer before a jury, the jury will be comprised of human beings following one single Article: the first one, the prime and overarching one. Charges will relate to crimes against the freedom, dignity and/or rights of other human beings, and betrayal of the spirit of brotherhood… then, and only then, will the blue human being finally ride the big red bird. Fly on, little wing. Fly on.

Photos from riacale here and here at Flickr via Creative Commons, I do so gratefully declare.